Indicators and Inventories: Wasted Opportunities?
Having conducted a plethora of studies on the effects of waste management on climate change, I've become used to those who speak about the contribution of waste management to climate change quoting figures that are misleading. If they are reporting on ‘changes in the emissions from waste management,’ when challenged on the accuracy of their figures, they often respond that they are citing emissions reported under the ‘waste’ section of the inventories as they are reported to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), in line with Guidelines for reporting developed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
This is, literally, where the problems start.
The waste section of the inventory of territorial GHGs, as reported to the UNFCCC, covers emissions from: ‘solid waste disposal sites’; incineration facilities where no energy is derived from them; biological treatment of waste; open burning of waste; as well as wastewater treatment. Even if these emissions were reported accurately (and the reporting is of a low quality in the vast majority of cases), the emissions reported under the waste section of the inventory give only a partial picture of what is happening to waste, a very limited picture of how waste management may contribute to a reduction in global greenhouse gas emissions, and a misleading view – when being presented as ‘the greenhouse gas emissions from waste management’ - as to how improvements in waste management can contribute to climate change mitigation.
Some of the reasons for this might be less important than others when one looks at the inventory as a whole. For example, emissions from incinerators, and other waste management facilities that generate energy, are, currently, reported under the ‘energy’ section of the inventory. Also, in a closed economy situation, any reduction in emissions associated with the use of recycled materials would manifest themselves through a reduction in emissions in either, or both, the ‘industrial production and product use’ section, or the ‘energy’ section. This would all be fine if those dealing with waste management had these points clearly pointed out to them, but all too often, they do not. In my experience, observers are only aware of the partial nature of the picture which the ‘waste’ section of the inventory paints if they have been pre-primed to appreciate this.
In any case, economies are not closed, even though movements of waste are subject to some rules (which are often flouted) designed to regulate their movement across borders. The UK, for example, exports some waste for incineration. It is also exports waste to other countries for recycling, though the amount actually recycled is an unknown fraction of the reported amount exported. It also happens to be somewhat reliant on imports of many primary materials, as well as finished products, when it comes to its own consumption.
Where waste is exported for incineration, those emissions will not appear in the UK inventory. They will appear in the receiving countries’ inventories under the ‘energy’ section. That reporting should reflect the actual emissions that occur, potentially linked to the composition of waste being incinerated by those countries.
In the case of recycling, situations could arise where, despite the fact that legitimate recycling activity can help reduce global greenhouse gas emissions, the emissions reported under the UK's inventory could actually increase. This would happen if, for example, an increase in recycling within the UK led to the displacement, at the margin, of primary materials that would otherwise have been imported from outside the UK.
Does any of this matter? I believe it does, and for the following reasons.
Fundamentally, reporting of waste emissions in this way is apt to mislead. The way in which waste management affects greenhouse gas emissions is rendered opaque by the fact that the emissions reported under the ‘waste’ section give a very poor indication of how changes in the management of waste can affect emissions of greenhouse gases. This has clear potential to lead to the wrong decisions being made. Indeed, there are models that have been developed for developing countries to use, intended to aid decision making, which focus only on the emissions reported under the waste section of the inventory. As a result, decision makers may be indifferent to some choices which have the same impact on the waste section of the inventory, but which lead to very different outcomes for global greenhouse gas emissions (and different outcomes for the totality of their own emissions). As a more general point, some decisions which ‘move the planet in the right direction’ can send emissions reported under a national inventory in the opposite direction.
Consider, for example, decisions regarding how to manage plastics, a decision which is preoccupying many decision makers across the world as we speak. If plastics are removed from landfill, there is essentially no impact on emissions from ‘waste’, as they appear in the ‘waste’ section of the inventory. It doesn’t matter, to the ‘waste’ section of the inventory, whether the plastics end up being recycled, or sent to an incinerator that generates energy. Yet the impact of the decision - whether to incinerate or recycle plastics - is shown in the figure below for the EU case. The difference between recycling, rather than incinerating, each tonne of plastic is 4 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions (see figure below). Similarly, increasing the recycling of metals would not give rise to any reported change in the ‘waste’ section of the inventory (or in the output of models whose scope is limited to what is covered under the ‘waste’ section of the UNFCCC GHG inventories.
GHG impacts of recycling plastics instead of incinerating them to generate electricity (shown for different carbon intensities of electricity generation; 258g CO2 is the carbon intensity of electricity as per ‘long-run marginal’ figures for ‘generation-based’ analysis in Supplementary Guidance to the HMT Green Book. The figure declines continuously and is below 50g in 2035 (again, according to Supplementary Guidance). PS=polystyrene; HDPE=high density polyethylene; LDPE=low density polyethylene; PP=polypropylene; PET= Polyethylene terephthalate; PVC=polyvinyl chloride.
Equanimator analysis
In case you are wondering whether this is ‘just’ an issue for developing countries, or in case you believe that I’m overplaying the way in which inventories might impact on what countries do, then we can also take a look closer to home. Defra has developed a series of indicators to help track performance under its Resources and Waste Strategy. One of these, GG1, reports greenhouse gas emissions from waste management, and takes its cue from the emissions from ‘waste’ reported under the National Atmospheric Emissions Inventory. Because that inventory, in turn, is structured in line with reporting of emissions to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the indicator does not even report what it claims to report. Rather than reliably tracking the impact of waste management on climate change, instead, it tracks the emissions which are reported under the waste section of the inventory. The two are not the same. Unsurprisingly, what is reported under GG1 closely tracks the quantity of waste landfilled, which is reported as a component of a separate indicator within the set.
The UK’s Climate Change Committee, in its report on ‘the waste sector’, recognised that emissions from those incinerators that generate energy ought really to be considered as part of ‘waste’ emissions. It added these to the other emissions already reported under the ‘waste’ section of the inventory. This still, however, omits the effect on greenhouse gas emissions of recycling. Logical consistency would have suggested that these also be included in the Climate Change Committee’s figures. As long as that never features in inventories, then it is difficult to see how our thinking about the contribution that ‘the waste sector’ can make to climate change mitigation will ever be complete.
These insights are not new. Whilst at Eunomia, work that I led developing the marginal abatement cost curve for waste (for Defra, the CCC and the Environment Agency) was designed to report using different scopes of emissions, one reflecting the changes in (not just the ‘waste’ section) emissions that the UK reported to the UNFCCC, the other, reflecting the impact on emissions from a global perspective. There is recognition of the issue, but all too rarely, only once it has been pointed out, and unfortunately, you need to understand the issue to be aware of the problem.
Correcting the GG1 indicator should be easy. The current formulation is poor - after all, what is GG1 really an indicator of? Essentially, it tracks the decline in landfill emissions that have taken place over recent decades, but the indicator is more or less indifferent to how waste is managed when it is no longer landfilled. The message being conveyed - and this applies, by extension, to the ‘waste’ section of the UNFCCC inventory - is that it doesn’t matter what you do with waste, just don’t landfill it. And the problem with that view is that it’s completely wrong.
It would be slightly more understandable if there were other indicators - in the spirit of a dashboard - that helped inform decision makers of the progress that improved waste management, but where GHG emissions associated with managing waste are concerned, that is not the case with Defra’s set of indicators. There’s much to admire in the indicator set, and Defra can be applauded for its ambition, but it’s useful to remember that indicators, where they aren’t the basis for statutory targets, can be tweaked. And indicators can, in their infacy, sometimes reveal how the chosen indicator might to be revised in order to make it more relevant and useful. That is the case with GG1 (and, I’d venture to suggest, one or two of the other indicators in use).
Where the inventories reported to the UNFCCC are concerned, these points ought, in my view, to be considered as a jumping off point for a far more fundamental review of how emissions are being reported within inventories, and how the effect of different greenhouse gases is aggregated. If inventories are to provide a reliable guide to action, then surely, the scope for situations arising under which what’s good for the planet can be bad for a national inventory (and vice versa) should be eliminated, or minimised?
The UK is well positioned to ensure just such a programme of work is instigated to ensure that countries are not reporting inventories in a way which provides a misleading basis for guiding their actions. A thorough and critical review of the reporting system and the inventory structure is urgently needed. Commitments are currently being made to objectives which have not been adequately specified. Until better methods for aggregating the effects of different GHGs are agreed upon, and until structuring inventories have been revised and stress-tested, then the promises made by political leaders will be made within a framework which might not be the best guide to action.
Furthermore, once these methods are clarified, a more sensible discussion can be had regarding what targets are appropriate (or not) for corporations and other organisations, and how progress against those should be measured. This might also inform a ‘budgeting’ approach for businesses.
Although there is now substantial agreement on the fact that ‘the climate science is clear’, or at least, increasingly so, the validity of reporting and accounting approaches still requires some serious thinking. Globally, we are still very much in the foothills of addressing the issue of climate change, and it’s not too late to change conventions that have persisted relatively intact since the mid-1990s. Indeed, it seems be essential to review them right now.